the eric update – day 90: five pounds! infant massage. another bath.

while flickr has been having issues, i’ve been getting behind on posting updates. so for now, i’ll just post the super abridged version and maybe i’ll get around to posting the longer version when time permits. you can see annotated photos from the day here.

5 pounds (2280 grams)! woohoo! he’s as heavy as a bag of sugar! weight gain despite reflux is a good thing.

infant massage. we’ve been giving him more massages lately to help keep the gas moving along. infant massage has also been shown to have all sorts of other benefits, so it’s a good thing to do regardless ( indeed, the nurses at the old nicu gave eric regular massages, but they don’t seem to think it’s as important at the new nicu ).

yet another bath. you can’t have too many bath pictures can you? no, you can’t, especially when you’re giving a bath to a baby swaddled in cloth diapers. it’s cute. honest

laaaater:

5 pounds (2280 grams)! woohoo! he’s as heavy as a bag of sugar! weight gain despite reflux is a good thing.

hmmmm. can you tell he’s hungry? putting a web cloth diaper on him worked so well, that we decided to go all out and swaddle him completely, only unwrapping the parts that we needed to wash when we needed to. bath times go a lot smoother now.

yeah, he’s hungry, but he’s pacified temporarily by the supersized paci. i imagine that he’s looking at me thinking, “i’m going to remember this when i’m 16.”

time to be dried off by pops. my hands still look purty large next to his head.

we’ve been giving him more massages lately to help keep the gas moving along. infant massage has also been shown to have all sorts of other benefits, so it’s a good thing to do regardless ( indeed, the nurses at the old nicu gave eric regular massages, but they don’t seem to think it’s as important at the new nicu ).

little odin loves to have his feet massaged. being in the nicu is tough work and after a long day, he thinks it’s just grand it you spend a little extra time on his feet.

don’t forget to massage the arm and hand! he’s strong and likes to flex his muscles in an effort to impress the nurses.

this move is called “paddling the waves” or something like that. but really it should be called “letting out the gas”. the rice makes him less gassy than the barley, but since he’s still not supposed to even be born for two more weeks, any solid stuff is rough on his gastrointestinal tract. so we spend extra time getting the gas out.

after the bath and massage, he’s more eager than ever to show us that he doesn’t need any help keeping the supersized paci in his mouth.

the final step of a good massage, of course, is getting to sleep in your most comfortable ‘jammies.

conflux - a curated confluence of curiousness

i’m not sure how to square these findings with the fact that i’ve long said that in a parallel universe very close to our own i live alone in cabin in the middle of nowhere writing manifestos: “The effect of population density on life satisfaction was therefore more than twice as large for low-IQ individuals than for high-IQ individuals,” they found. And “more intelligent individuals were actually less satisfied with life if they socialized with their friends more frequently.”

the heart warming fable of thanksgiving, unsurprisingly, ends up being a whole lot more complicated than some of us were taught and answers the nagging question of how squanto spoke perfect english when the pilgrims arrived and what was happening during the 100 year interim between columbus and the pilgrims ( spoiler: it involves human trafficking, enslavement and villages being wiped out ). and if you’re a stickler for tradition, you should put ditch the turkey and cranberry sauce for salted pork and olives since the spanyiards were the first to celebrate thanksgiving 50 years before the pilgrims.

“…researchers from a Bosch startup called Deepfield Robotics presented a paper on “Vision-Based High-Speed Manipulation for Robotic Ultra-Precise Weed Control,” which has like four distinct exciting-sounding phrases in it.”IEEE Spectrum

after updating to iOS 9 and el capitan i’ve been having troubles synching photos from my iphone to my macbook air. the mac would recognize the iphone but no photos would show up in the photos application or image capture. it was driving me nuts. turns out, if you have non-apple services like dropbox running that sync your photos to non-icloud services you have to turn them off.

having run a half a dozen marathons, i can’t imagine finishing in 3:05. even more unimaginable in full amish garb so kudos to leroy stolzfus. the whole article is great read but now i want to know more of the backstory on why he started to run: “A few years ago, Stolzfus got “involved with some stuff” he said he shouldn’t have. His brother-in-law suggested he start running instead when he was tempted. He took the suggestion to heart, and went out for a run.”

huh, who knew edward tufte has a farm with 234-acres of landscape sculpture fields that he opens to the public once a year. i’d love to make a trip. and i also love the article’s description of tufte, “[he] is also known as a genius of data visualization, professor emeritus of political science, statistics, and computer science at Yale, an author of books on information design, and a hater of PowerPoint.

“The Chagossian people have a word, in their Creole language, for heartbreak: sagren. It is a profound sorrow which refers to the loss of a home, and the impossibility of returning to it. As we build new worlds with our technologies, knitted from fiber-optic light and lines of code, it is incumbent on us to ensure it does not reproduce the erasures and abuses of the old, but properly accounts for the rights and liberties of every one of us.”citizen-ex

“There is no doubt that retail is making a big bet on health care. If it succeeds, the payoff will be enormous. But just as Uber is at war with the taxi industry, retailers will soon be at war with the large, publicly-traded health care chains.”venture beat

wow.“Beginning with this weekend’s NHL All-Star Skills Competition and All-Star Game, the NHL will use GoPro cameras to deliver viewers never-before-seen perspectives of the game.” odin and i would watch this all. day. long. A++

“Our current cultural obsession with food is undeniable. But, while the advent of the foodie may be a 21st century phenomenon, from an evolutionary standpoint, flavor has long helped define who we are as a species, a new book argues.”npr

“Here’s the thing: in order for fees to work, there needs be something worth paying to avoid. That necessitates, at some level, a strategy that can be described as “calculated misery.” Basic service, without fees, must be sufficiently degraded in order to make people want to pay to escape it. And that’s where the suffering begins.”the new yorker